Critical
geopolitics investigates the geographical assumptions and designations that enter
into the making of world politics (Agnew 2003:2). It seeks to illuminate and explain
the practices by which political actors spatialize international politics and represent
it as a “world” characterized by particular types of places (Ó Tuathail and Agnew
1992:190). This strand of analysis approaches geopolitics not as a neutral consideration
of pregiven “geographical” facts, but as a deeply ideological and politicized
form of analysis. Eschewing the traditional question of how geography does or
can influence politics, it investigates how geographical claims and assumptions
function in political debates and political practice. In so doing, it seeks to disrupt
mainstream geopolitical discourses: not to study the geography of politics within
pregiven, commonsense places, but to foreground “the politics of the geographical
specification of politics” (Dalby 1991:274). Critical geopolitics is not a neatly
delimited field, but the diverse works characterized as such all focus on the processes
through which political practice is bound up with territorial definition. [...]

Merje Kuus
is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. Her
work focuses on geopolitics and contemporary Europe. Dr. Kuus is the author of
Geopolitics Reframed: Security and Identity in Europe’s Eastern Enlargement
(2007) as well as numerous articles on security, identity, and intellectuals of
statecraft. She is currently working on a long-term project on the transformations
of political space at the external borders of the EU.